Romance Was Born

I'm Anna Plunkett from Romance Was Born.

I'm Luke Sales from Romance was born and I'm a fashion designer. Did you ask us to say that?

Okay, so start at the beginning. Well, we went to the same fashion school. I moved from Maitland near Newcastle and Anna moved from Albury. We were at first year fashion school together but we were in different classes. And we kind of became friends towards the end of first year. end of first year. Somehow we just gravitated and then we just realized we were so similar and we didn’t really think about it. We just went with it.

Yeah, you don't, when you're young, just don't overthink things. It's just all instinct. And we were treating it like it was an art practice and it was just our craft or our hobby really. Making money to be able to make more stuff to be more creative.

Hi, I'm Samuel Hodge. I'm an artist and I have the joy of making the Romance Was Born commission. We met at a Christmas party at the Cricketers Arms Hotel in 2005. They had a really fun group of friends. And I think because I always had a camera on me at the time, I would just take shots and they just gathered up.

So today when we first saw the work, we're like, Sam, he's done such an awesome job, and we're having a bit of a laugh before because it's so us that we have like a whole wall and it's like four different works and it's like so extra. And yeah, I just think it's a really good representation of who we are as people within our world. And yeah, I think Sam's just captured it really, really beautifully. I think as soon as you look at it as well, it feels very Romance Was Born, which is awesome.

The collage aspect of it, the colours when you first see it as well. It's quite magical. Yeah, and it's very much, I think, what me and Anna tried to do with our work. It's loud, but it's soft, and I feel like that's who we are as well, like how we balance each other out. Yeah, and who we are as designers and the kind of clothing that we make and this world that we've made, which is, you know, Romance Was Born. It's a really weird feeling because it does mark a point in our career where we're like, far out 20 years, it's like a mirror of this other time.

You know, you like trying not to get too sentimental with work, but you are really triggered through this process a lot of the time with all these memories. Having known them and seeing their shows, it would have been too easy to have made a straight up portrait of them. It's very much like an elaborate version of like a teenager's bedroom or a scrapbook. That type of approach to making, it's really freeing. I don't know how to describe it, but it felt like a cell that was kind of expanding. And I also think if you have the opportunity to make a work, why not go extra? Why not push yourself into kind of that space of discomfort?

It kind of makes sense when we see it like that. We're like, oh, it feels how we imagined it. But seeing a portrait of ourselves on the wall, that still doesn't make sense. One of the first things I saw was the photo that's like of Anna's old dog who used to come to our office every day for like 10 years. 20 photos of him. Yeah. But we just loved him so much. And when I had a Jenny Key doona that I bought him on eBay, and a doona cover and he had a special little couch. And yeah, we would always be pandering. Fussing over him or dressing him up. To see Sam put him in the work so much, I was I was like, oh, he's like such a huge part of our life. That was, it made me feel a bit emotional. It's really amazing to think about that. It's kind of like us and our baby in a way. Oh, my God. But money was always our baby. Yeah, he'll always be our baby.